dillekant

This mostly doesn't happen in Australia. Zebra crossing means stop. A lot of pedestrians won't even check, they just walk onto the road on a crossing.

I feel like maybe we did these in the petrostates to get them out of the way. The next one is in Brazil with (hopefully) Lula. Let's see how it goes.

Legends. The article kind of annoys me though:

NSW shadow minister for police Paul Toole has labelled the protesters "numbskulls".

While Paul Toole is an expert at being a numbskull, he's no expert at identifying them. No idea why the ABC thought about taking his opinion on the matter.

I think there's definitely an element of "the people in charge know what to do", or that it's a transient problem, not one which locks us into effort for centuries.

There's still a pay-off time. For inter-city travel where the distance is long or the usage is low, it might be worth doing this, if only in the short term.

It might also break the cycle of no demand leading to no supply leading to no demand etc.

The forces at play are far greater than you realize in scope and scale

I know it's a turn of phrase but you don't know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.

Your pitching

The future you want

You're assuming a lot given what I've said. It's not an "in effect" thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you're missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.

The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.

This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.

Simplification is always regressive and backwards.

Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up "simplification as a regressive thing" with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It's clear you do not understand the article nor my points.

The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans

Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we've tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.

Often it's a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today's zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.

The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.

This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn't. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the "choice" of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. "oh no thanks. I'll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development."

Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses

Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.

Ultimately, the issue is cultural.

The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say "the things we own end up owning us" but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.

If there was a word for "genius" but for being a good person instead of smart, she would be that.

Values are not a disability.

Because that’s not how human nature works

Solarpunk is optimistic. You're probably looking for Green Growth or Cyberpunk.

Trust starts to weaken with scale

You don't need to use an altcoin, you can use the real legal tender of many countries you "don't trust" to buy stuff. Buy Argentine currency and use it to trade. You need to trust something at some point, and what you're (maybe unknowingly) doing is trusting authoritarian institutions. Code cannot substitute for that.

Your argument seems to be "Authoritarianism is a reasonable thing to sacrifice in order to enable trustless purchases" in the same breath as "But also I don't even trust the authorities", assuming you're arguing for an altcoin.

like money and trust are opposed

OK let's say you owe me a dollar and I just remember that. How is an altcoin superior to you trusting me?

trust in people doesn’t scale at all

So you do think it's a real dichotomy?

but if we use paypal and ebay i can kinda trust those 2 platforms

If they are paying paypal, you are leveraging paypal to create a threat of violence on them. That's not very Solarpunk of you.